A Dream of Belonging: Afropolitan Tensions, Grief and Ecological Exhaustion in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count

This paper examines Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Dream Count through the critical dual frameworks of postcolonial ecocriticism and affect theory, with a focus on Afropolitan identity and environmental dislocation. Through the intersecting narratives of four African women—three affluent Nigerians and one working-class Guinean immigrant—Adichie interrogates the promises and limitations of diasporic mobility, revealing the emotional, ecological, and ethical costs of transnational life. The novel dismantles triumphalist Afropolitan narratives by exposing the affective toll of gendered migration, cultural translation, and ecological abandonment. It also dramatizes the slow violence of neocolonial resource extraction and infrastructural neglect, situating personal grief within larger systems of planetary precarity. This paper argues that Dream Count does not merely represent postcolonial realities but performs an affective and ecological witnessing that demands critical re-evaluation of cosmopolitanism, care, and survival. By weaving affect into environmental critique, Adichie’s novel makes visible the burdens often hidden beneath the surface of Afropolitan success.